I can't believe the entertainment industry makes that kind of profit.

Yes, the entertainment industry really does have budgets much, much larger
than NASA's.

As an example for the short-term goal of landing a permanent exploration
base on the money, consider just one company in the entertainment
industry: in 1993 Disney's budget was four times higher
than that of the International Space Station program. In 1994,
their annual revenues exceeded NASA's entire budget, and their
profit that year exceeded the entire budget for the space station
program.

For a longer-term example, where we establish a self-supporting lunar
community: the number two export industry in the world today is
tourism. People spend more money on tourism than anything else,
except for energy. (Energy is the key industry in
some of the possible scenarios for the growth of the lunar community;
but that's a different question.)

As we apply increasing automation to the industries that provide our
basic needs, the market share of the entertainment industry grows.
Right now, it's growing so fast that we can't hope to maintain all
the applicable data in this FAQ. Whole new industries have been
added to the tally that didn't even exist when we started studying
this problem -- the entire range of video games, virtual reality
simulations, and the Internet were barely in their infancy the first
time we ran a spreadsheet for the Artemis Project.

You'll find additional examples and more detailed financial analyses
throughout the Artemis Data Book; so for an answer to this
frequently raised objection, suffice it to say that if you have
difficulty on this point, you need to do some research before trusting
your gut feelings about what people spend their money on.

Aside: The Artemis Society could use some help from clever
web programmers to create programs that can keep these financial
statistics updated. The numbers are available on the web, but it
will take a lot of work to find them, and then to create and maintain
a program to put them all together. (Caution: This is a non-trivial
project, worthy of a PhD thesis.) If you would like to tackle this
problem, contact the ASI Electronic Communications Technical Committee
and the ASI Business Team. You'll find contact information in
section 6 of the Artemis Data Book.